


some other ending begins

by aslightstep



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), all relationships are minor, author takes liberities with Russo Rules, but a happier ending, canon pepperony, extra-canon Stevetony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 10:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18658414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslightstep/pseuds/aslightstep
Summary: All he wishes is for Thanos and his forces to turn to dust. The stones take a little more.After Tony Stark dies, he drifts.





	some other ending begins

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [И начинается другой конец](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20132725) by [Minerva_HW](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minerva_HW/pseuds/Minerva_HW)



> Like I've said on tumblr and twitter, this is incredibly rushed and choppy. I don't plan on ever fixing it, as it was the immediate result of watching Endgame and incredibly cathartic. However, I'm happy if it gives other people the moment of peace it gave me :D. Thank you for reading.

He sees Rhodey, smiling but wrong, tears in his eyes. Peter is saying “we won,” he says it again and again but each time his voice shakes more. He is splitting apart at the seams and Tony wants to hold him together, can’t lose him again, but he can’t move.

His arm is so heavy.

Pepper is there. Pepper is there and she is smiling and oh, Tony has seen this smile before.

 _Oh_ , Tony is dying.

**_Morgan._ **

“We’ll be okay,” Pepper promises. His love,  _honey_ , all his darlings here together, everyone but Morgan, and she’ll be safe. She’ll be okay. Pepper promises.

“You can rest.”

There is Steve in the distance, Thor at his shoulder. There is Bruce, bounding through the air, closer every second. There is Clint, and T'Challa, and Scott, shaking the dust off. There is Nebula, and she isn’t alone.

There are the Avengers, and they are alive, and Tony has won.

Tony rests.

* * *

 

He does not die.

His body does, dies and calcifies where the gauntlet reached, withers before they can get him into a coffin. He watches, from green eyes and yellow, purple, blue, orange, red.

He never wished for this, but the stones take him anyway.

He drifts and he watches. Mostly Morgan and Pepper, sometimes Peter.

Steve leaves, and Tony follows for a time. He drops off one stone, then another, scattering Tony across time and space. He leaves the tesseract for last, and Tony knows before Steve does what’s going to happen.

“Live your life, Steve,” he whispers, and Steve shudders. Sighs. Hunches over and something inhuman wrenches out of his throat.

“None of that,” Tony chides. He takes a chance, reaches through the tesseract to nudge at Steve’s hand til it lands on his opposite wrist. “Be happy.”

09-02-1945, Steve presses in, and then he is gone.

Tony waits until Steve knocks on Peggy’s door, and then he lets go, drifting back to his daughter.

* * *

 

He is not always with Morgan. She’s strong like her mother and twice as clever as her father ever was. She’ll always need him, Tony knows that. He always needed Howard, too, even when he hated him. And he is there, in the smile on her face in the morning after a good dream, in the moments she wants to live in forever, in the perfect words that come to her mouth when the school bully gets a bit too mean.

She needs him, but she is strong without him, too. He trusts her, and he trusts Pepper’s promise. He drifts away sometimes, to the places Steve scattered him and further. Time ripples outward, branches begetting branches. He sees so much.

He tilts the Winter Soldier’s head in 1967 so he notices the Northern Lights so bright above him. He lives in the lights above Sam Wilson's bunk in 2011 so he and Riley can play one more round of cards. He whispers to Loki _take a left, take a left_ and watches the god as he’s swallowed in his father and brother’s hugs when they return from their travels. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are starving in 2007, and it is nothing to make then piece of bread they share fill them as much as an entire loaf.

He cannot do much. He doesn’t want to, either. But this is how he rests: he fixes.

* * *

 

Gamora is made of sterner stuff, and does not die immediately when she hits the ground on Vormir in 2018. Natasha is human, and does.

He holds Gamora's hand as she passes and pushes back Natasha's hair, and thinks of the two little girls he can hear sometimes, playing in the water. Thinks of Natasha’s soul brushing his.

 _Shellhead_.

“You did it, you know,” he tells her body, _their_ bodies. “You saved us.”

* * *

 

He goes back to check on Steve and his perfect world.

But Steve is not there.

* * *

 

Steve would take lifetimes to find, in this ever spreading tree their timeline has grown. Tiny changes upon tiny changes, too many to count, the farthest tips nigh unrecognizable from what he knew.

Back there, Morgan is grown. Peter is married. Harley Keener is Iron Man, at Carol Danvers' right hand, and the world moves on. Tony is gone, from legend to memory, at rest. He wraps the covers a little tighter around Pepper and Morgan that night as they watch a movie on the couch, and then he lets go.

He will take lifetimes if it means Steve is alright.

It is not his Steve in the world where he never goes into the ice. His Steve is not the several happily, madly in love with Sharon Carter. He is not in the first reality that Tony encounters where he and Janet van Dyne are somehow contemporaries, nor the thirty third, by which point Hank Pym has been added to their numbers.

There are blue eyed Tonys, Tonys who are brothers, Tonys who are not really Starks at all. There is a Tony, young and bright eyed, on the edge of a time vortex he does not dare approach. A Tony dying of cancer with a stone inside his head. A Tony standing tall in black and gold armor.

Steve is at his side. Steve is at _every Tony’s_ side. But none are his.

* * *

 

(It is on his thirtieth world that Gamora slips away. At first he panics, wonders if he’s gone too far, until he looks down at the Gamora of this time, who had sacrificed her essence so her team may live. She takes a harsh breath in, color returning to her cheeks, and she is not quite the Gamora they lost, but…that Gamora is no longer lost, either.

On another, Wanda Maximoff cries out in loneliness to a world that won’t listen, and Tony feels as a piece of the mind stone breaks free, and Vision returns to his love.

He is cautious in the next world, and many after. Scared to lose Natasha. But when they encounter a world where Natasha Romanov lives but isn’t whole, the red room gone terrifyingly wrong, he knows what she must do.

 _Don’t work too hard, Tony_ , she tells him, clearer than ever, a bell across the cosmos.

 _I’m resting, didn’t you hear, Romanov_?

 _Yeah_ , she says, and he can see her smile so clearly.  _You’re rested_.

And then she’s gone from him. The Natasha of this timeline stands, stiff and ungainly, and the guards are screaming, but she’s already escaping. Heading to find her family.

Tony moves on.)

* * *

 

 _I’m not half as good as anything as when I’m doing it next to you_ , a Tony tells his Steve.

Every Tony needs a Steve.

* * *

 

 _You gave me a home_ , that same Steve chokes out.

 _You lead, I’ll follow_ , another tells his Tony.

Every Steve, apparently, needs a Tony, too.

* * *

 

Every Steve –  _ **oh**_.

* * *

 

He traces back, close to the roots. There is a reality, too similar to their own for his initial search. Steve, in the ice, then awakened 70 years later. Tony, vain and selfish until his own missile blows him up. Steve would never come here. There was nothing here he was missing.

But this world’s Steve goes down with the helicarriers. He is not the Steve that swims to the surface.

“Oh god Steve,” Tony whispers as he watches. A Tony – who looks like him, moves like him, jokes like him, is him – smiles as he sets down his tools, accepting the sandwich Steve has brought down to the workshop and the kiss that follows.

He never said-

He never did-

But he’s happy, Tony can see. They both are.

He traces their time forward. The civil war that never happens. The snap that never comes. There is a rather large blow up when Tony Stark meddles with his own DNA to stay a little longer, but a wedding soon follows. There are battles and anniversaries and celebrations and funerals. There is Tony’s funeral. Then there is Steve, opening an old drawer and making one last jump.

Their timeline in 2023 is a sharp shock. He feels Morgan and Pepper and Rhodey and Peter, but he isn’t sad. Pepper was right, as she always is. They’re okay, and Tony can rest.

Tony has rested.

Steve gives the shield to Sam and sits back. He rubs at his wedding ring. He’s dying very soon, Tony knows.

“Don’t you worry, Cap,” Tony says. “I’ll take it from here. You. You made me proud.”

Steve smiles.

* * *

 

There is a world, a reality at the far reaches, where Tony Stark is stillborn.

Tony watches as the doctors work over him, as Maria cries, as Howard paces in the hall.

This Tony Stark slips away, and for a moment he almost envies him. It was hard work. It had broken him more times than he could count, in more realities than he could count.

But no Tony Stark would have it any other way.

And there is a Steve here, resting in the ice. A Natasha, her soul as vibrant as before. Bruce and Thor. Clint, not born yet here. Pepper and Rhodey. And he’s not so arrogant to believe this reality needs him.

But the Avengers do.

(Steve does.)

He snags at Anthony Stark’s fading soul, embracing it in his own. He wraps time and power and space and reality around him, holds on tight, and pushes. In the room, a baby breathes.

* * *

 

Tony Stark wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> catch me on twitter and tumblr @aslightstep


End file.
